4 posts categorized "Chicago's lakefront"

June 11, 2009

Excerpts from today's editorial about the Friends of the Parks plan for an entirely-open lakefront:

"It would let many residents, especially those on the South Side, feel like they actually have access to the lakefront for the first time.

"It would provide an economic boost to the surrounding areas and offer environmental benefits for generations to come...

"The Friends of the Parks plan would take Chicago's most marvelous resource -- and make it better.

"This is a project that could have an impact on the city equivalent to Millennium Park, but to the benefit of more than just the folks with the time and money to head downtown to hear a symphony under the Gehry band shell.

"It's a plan that needs to be talked up and promoted, shaping it up to be carried out when our economy comes out of the doldrums."

June 10, 2009

One of the most articulate responses to yesterday's Cityscapes column comes from Bill Savage, who teaches Chicago literature, history, and politics at Northwestern University, where he is a Senior Lecturer in the English Department. Bill opposes Friends of the Parks' proposal for two miles of lakefront parkland in Rogers Park and Edgewater. He summons the ghost of the Jane Jacobs, that champion of the stoop and small-scale city life, to vie with Friends of the Parks' evocation of Daniel Burnham, Mr. Big Plans.

(At left, Pratt Boulevard Beach.)

By Bill Savage

Anyone who thinks, as Erma Tranter of Friends of the Parks and the Tribune’s Blair Kamin apparently do, that citizens of Rogers Park “don’t sense that they have a lakefront park system” due to “an intimidating combination of high rises, “Private Property” signs and fences topped with razor wire” hasn’t spent a lot of time in the summer in Rogers Park and Edgewater. The street-end beaches in Rogers Park teem with picnickers, swimmers, volleyball and frisbee players, dog-walkers and sun-bathers. Good luck finding a parking spot within a half mile of the beach. We know damn well we have a lakefront park system, some right at our doorsteps, though sometimes we have to ride our bikes or take the El a few blocks or miles south to get to the larger part of it.

Chicagoans love to brag about their open, people-friendly lakefront. In reality, 4 of the city’s 30 miles of Lake Michigan shoreline are unavailable to the public—cordoned off by an intimidating combination of high-rises, “Private Property” signs and fences topped by razor wire. That’s more than 13 percent of the waterfront, an outrageous violation of Daniel Burnham’s ringing epigram that the lakefront “by right belongs to the people.”

On Tuesday, however, the advocacy group Friends of the Parks will unveil a visionary plan that seeks to change that.

Called “The Last Four Miles,” the plan proposes to plug these holes with 2 miles of new parkland on both the north and south lakefronts. If fully carried out, it would create a chain of parks, beaches, lagoons and bike trails that would stretch without interruption from the Evanston border on the north to the Indiana state line on the south. “Park poor” neighborhoods on the city’s edges, which the City of Chicago defines as those with fewer than 2 acres of park per 1,000 persons, would get new swaths of green.

“There are people who don’t sense that they have a lakefront park system. They don’t have a place to bike or walk,” said the group’s president, Erma Tranter. “Where do they go to enjoy Lake Michigan, the breezes, the sun? They’ve been blocked off consistently from that land.”

Now comes the hard part: The estimated tab for the Friends of the Parks plan runs anywhere from $350 million to $450 million, and the non-profit has precious little of that money in hand. Nor does it have official backing from Mayor Richard Daley’s Chicago Park District, even though the mayor, an avid cyclist, has publicly expressed frustration at gaps in the lakefront bike trail. Moreover, the plan is sure to face tenacious opposition from shoreline property owners in the Edgewater, Rogers Park and South Shore neighborhoods.

Still, the idea of a completely open lakefront is a seed worth sowing, especially as the city readies for next week’s opening of two architect-designed pavilions in Millennium Park that will mark its centennial celebration of Burnham’s legendary Plan of Chicago. The Burnham Plan, as it’s often called, endowed Chicago with miles of lakefront parks and the ethic of a shoreline open to all.